When outfielder Chris Sweeney left home earlier this summer, he was going to be a professional baseball player.

It was just a matter of where.

First stop was Burlington.

For pitcher Mike Jeffreys, his voyage took him to an Alaska summer league for college players.

Eventually, he landed with the Burlington Royals, too.

Despite different paths, similarities are striking for Sweeney and Jeffreys, who’ve formed a bond of sorts. They’re both players from Division III colleges in Pennsylvania.

“Loving the chance,” Sweeney said. “Not a lot of guys where Mike (and I) come from have a chance to do this. We’re all just trying to take advantage of the opportunity.”

They’re professional players, and making first impressions in their unlikely pursuits.

It’s almost like they’re in this together. Their lockers are even side-by-side in the Royals clubhouse.

“We make jokes that some guys who go to big schools don’t understand,” Jeffreys said, pointing out that experiences from the small-time programs are different from those who played for major-college teams.

Sweeney arrived out of King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Jeffreys played for Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa.

Jeffreys, a 6-foot-4 right-hander, could have returned to Geneva for a senior season, but after the Kansas City organization scouted him in the Alaska Baseball League he received a free-agent offer and accepted it.

Sweeney was running out of time because he went undrafted after his senior year. To stay in shape, he played in a few adult-league events and “any game I could find” before coming to Burlington for a tryout.

“I got asked to come down for a workout,” he said. “They asked if I was still available to sign. This is the only team I worked out for.”

If Sweeney didn’t receive an offer from the Royals, he was heading to Indiana to play for the Evansville Otters in the independent Frontier League.

“I wouldn’t have driven all the way down here without a plan,” he said of the approximate nine-hour trip.

With a saturated field at Burlington Athletic Stadium, workouts across two days were limited to the covered batting cage. Manager Tommy Shields and hitting coach Abraham Nunez, both former big leaguers, conducted the sessions.

“We hit in the cage,” said Shields, who also scouts for the organization. “We couldn’t even get on the field. We told Scott (Sharp, Kansas City’s director of player development) from what we’ve seen, we’d sign him.”

Sweeney, 21, accompanied the team on a three-game trip to Elizabethton, Tenn., but he wasn’t activated on the roster until the team returned home and his medical testing was complete. At the time, he became the oldest of five outfielders on the team.

Page 2 of 2 - He said he fit in fine playing along side players from more high-profile backgrounds.

“I did it the past two summers playing summer ball,” he said. “It will be a transition, but this is nothing too new to me.”

His professional debut came about 2˝ months since the end of King’s College’s season in late April.

“It has been longer than I would like to wait, but it’s stuff you can’t control,” he said.

Sharp met Sweeney, who stands 6-3, upon arriving along with other minor-league officials and instructors from the parent Kansas City club for a July visit.

“Just looking at him, you like what you see,” Sharp said.

Now it’s up to Sweeney to show what he can do.

“There’s an adjustment to playing,” he said at the time. “I’ll have to adjust to the speed of the game. I’ve done it before so I’m looking forward to it.”

Sweeney has six extra-base hits, including two home runs, with a .208 batting average in 21 games. He has been stellar at times defensively, usually playing left field or right field.

This comes with a modest outlook.

“I think any play not making an error is a good one,” Sweeney said when questioned about a couple of catches in a recent game.

Jeffreys came on board with the Burlington team about a month later after Sweeney. It never occurred to him that he would be in such a situation.

Jeffreys headed to Alaska for the summer league figuring he would be back at Geneva completing work on an engineering degree this fall.

“I had no idea I was being looked at,” he said. “I had a pretty good two games. I went to a small school and they hadn’t really heard of me.”

He ended up with discussions with five professional teams, selecting Kansas City’s offer.

There were no hints that he would be drafted in June, Jeffreys said, so he was content with returning to school. With a fastball registering 92 mph (and occasionally a tad higher), he gained some interest.

Jeffreys, 21, hasn’t given up an earned run in four appearances covering six innings.

“He throws strikes,” Shields said. “He’s not scared. He’s not afraid. I have confidence in him.”

Despite their Division III backgrounds on the opposite sides of the same state, paths never crossed for Sweeney and Jeffreys until they united in Burlington.